Tag: Alberta Politics Substack

Categories
Alberta Politics

Tim Cartmell’s big money Better Edmonton campaign falls flat

Tim Cartmell was the perceived frontrunner who had been posturing for a mayoral run for years and entered the race with a large campaign war chest and a tailor made Better Edmonton Party with a slate of council candidates in each ward.

In theory, the menu of fundraising and organizational advantages available to him should have vaulted Cartmell into the mayor’s office.

The advantages the party structure could give candidates with large bases of corporate donor support was the real political incentive in mind when the province’s United Conservative Party government decided to inject municipal political parties into Edmonton and Calgary elections. Cartmell’s mayoral campaign is expected to have spent more than $1 million on the race, making it the most expensive election campaign in Edmonton’s history.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

 

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

Andrew Knack as the progressive choice for mayor

Andrew Knack spent most of his 12 years on Edmonton city council playing the role of the mild-mannered moderate centrist who was known for going above and beyond to engage with his constituents. But in this election, Knack was cast as the progressive alternative to Tim Cartmell’s corporate donor backed campaign.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

Tim Cartmell’s big money mayoral campaign in Edmonton

Edmonton mayoral candidate Tim Cartmell (source: Tim Cartmell / Facebook)
Edmonton mayoral candidate Tim Cartmell (source: Tim Cartmell / Facebook)

Tim Cartmell’s mayoral campaign stalling in the polls became even more surprising last week when Elections Edmonton financial disclosures showed that his campaign raised more than $800,000 by the end of July, largely because of corporate and wealthy individual donors. That means Cartmell’s campaign will have raised almost more money than all the other mayoral candidates combined and the most money of any mayoral candidate in Edmonton’s history.

Cartmell’s early start and Better Edmonton Party slate of council candidates should, in theory, give him a voter identification advantage on October 20. But Cartmell’s series of missteps, including his recently fumbling and bumbling when asked a simple question about whether his corporate donors put him in a conflict of interest, is not an inspiring performance of a future mayor.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

Andrew Knack, Jeromy Farkas in the lead in mayoral election polls

Edmonton mayoral candidate Andrew Knack (source: Andrew Knack / Facebook)
Edmonton mayoral candidate Andrew Knack (source: Andrew Knack / Facebook)

It’s the gift every election candidate in Alberta dreams of in the final stretch of the campaign: a Janet Brown poll showing you’re in the lead.

That’s what big city mayoral candidates Andrew Knack and Jeromy Farkas got on October 10. Two polls commissioned by CBC and conducted by well-respected pollster Janet Brown showed Knack in the lead in Edmonton’s mayoral race and Farkas leading in the race to become Calgary’s next mayor.

Read all about it on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

UCP and NDP Presidents Rob Smith and Bill Tonita running in municipal elections

Bill Tonita (centre) with fellow NDP candidates Chantal Saramaga-McKenzie (left) and Karen Shaw (right) during the 2023 provincial election. (source: Bill Tonita / Facebook)
Bill Tonita (centre) with fellow NDP candidates Chantal Saramaga-McKenzie (left) and Karen Shaw (right) during the 2023 provincial election. (source: Bill Tonita / Facebook)

The introduction of municipal political parties in Calgary and Edmonton has generated a lot of confusion and consternation in this election but lost in the noise of the big city debate is that the presidents of Alberta’s two main provincial political parties are on ballots in county elections outside urban centres.

United Conservative Party President Rob Smith is running as a candidate in Mountain View County council’s Division 6 and Alberta NDP President Bill Tonita is running for re-election in Strathcona County’s Ward 4.

Also, big city mayoral candidates Andrew Knack and Jeromy Farkas got the gift every election candidate in Alberta dreams of in the final stretch of the campaign: a Janet Brown poll showing you’re in the lead.

Read more on the Daveberta Subsrtack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

Teachers used to be part of the PC Party big blue tent

Teachers used to be an important part of the big blue voter coalition that made the old Progressive Conservative Party an electoral juggernaut from 1971 to 2015.

There was even a former ATA President, Halvar Johnson, who served as a PC MLA under premiers Peter Lougheed and Don Getty and later as a cabinet minister in Premier Ralph Klein’s government. The relationship between teachers and the PC government had its rocky moments, but it was still common for teachers and even ATA officials to attend and participate in debates and votes at PC Party conventions.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

Breaking the ATA is in the official UCP policy book

Breaking up the ATA and making membership in the union optional for teachers are actual official UCP policies that were enthusiastically passed by delegates at the party’s convention last year in Red Deer.

In defending the policy to make membership optional, the UCP constituency association from Innisfail-Sylvan Lake wrote that the ATA is “supporting many controversial progressive ideologies that do not represent the values of many teachers who are forced to pay dues in order to maintain employment in this province.”

The policy was passed weeks after anti-sexual health education protests organized by UCP-connected activists were held outside the ATA’s offices in Edmonton. The political mood of those protests align with Nicolaides moral panic book ban fiasco and the government’s targeting of transgender and female students who want to play school sports.

But partisan conservatives didn’t always feel this way about teachers.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

Posh private schools get public funding in Alberta

Looming large over the government’s labour dispute with teachers in public, Catholic, and Francophone schools is the lavish funding the province spends on private schools.

Private schools in Alberta get 70 per cent per-student funding from the provincial government, which is the highest of any province in Canada. That tops BC, which funds private schools between 35 and 50 per cent, Saskatchewan, which funds up to 50 per cent. Ontario and the Atlantic provinces do not fund private schools at all.

Although there is a wide spectrum of private schools that provide different types of education to different groups of students, some of the private institutions receiving generous public funding include elite schools tailored to Calgary’s wealthiest families and charge more than $20,000 in annual tuition.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

UCP cries poverty on funding but promises to build more schools

While the government cries poverty when it comes to the per-student funding, classroom sizes, and salary increases teachers are asking for, Premier Danielle Smith frequently points to her big promises of capital investments in the education system.

Smith promised in a televised address last year that the UCP government would build 130 new schools by 2031, which is a lot, but with the student population of the province growing by more than 33,000 per year (Smith’s number), that’s just playing catch up.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

UCP Government ads are slicker than it’s spokespeople

The UCP government launched a series of advertisements shortly after the ATA announced its plans to strike. The ads promote what the government describes as “a good plan” and are short, easy to understand, and are framed as a policy proposal rather than a bargaining position.

Where the paid advertising ends and the spokespeople start talking is when the government’s messaging starts going off the rails.

The government’s messaging was derailed last week when senior UCP staffer Bruce McAllister publicly berated a high school student for asking a question about the teachers’ strike and private school funding during the Alberta Next panel town hall in Calgary. McAllister, a former news anchor-turned-Wildrose Party MLA who now runs the Premier’s Office in Calgary, told the young man that his parents should spank him before he cut off his microphone.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

Danielle Smith’s UCP digging in for a long teachers’ strike

Premier Danielle Smith, Minister of Finance Nate Horner, and Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides say they are disappointed with the strike but have given no indication they were eager to return to the bargaining table to, well, actually bargain.

Smith, Horner and Nicolaides have signalled that they are prepared for a long teachers strike, and, despite claiming the cupboards are bare, the government will pay parents $30 a day to do teachers’ jobs from home, sort of, during a strike.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

All about Alberta politics in Fall 2025

Alberta’s Legislature Building through the view of a broken glass panel in summer 2025 (credit: Dave Cournoyer)
Alberta’s Legislature Building through the view of a broken glass panel in summer 2025 (credit: Dave Cournoyer)

Danielle Smith and Naheed Nenshi will spar in the Legislature but the most interesting politics will be on the road

A recent fundraising email from Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi with the subject line “Sooner than we think?” includes speculation that Smith’s United Conservative Party is “so afraid of losing power, they’re trying everything to give themselves an unfair advantage. Including US-style gerrymandering.”

Nenshi’s “US-style gerrymandering” comment was a reference to UCP cabinet minister Nathan Neudorf’s controversial proposal to split the southern Alberta city of Lethbridge into four sprawling rural-urban ridings (a story that was first reported on Daveberta). It’s certainly clear what Neudorf’s preference is, but whether it gets included in the soon to be submitted interim report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission is yet to be seen.

The new boundaries will certainly play a big role in the next provincial election but regardless of how the provincial map is redrawn, most voting intention polls show not much has changed since the last provincial election. That vote resulted in two-way race between the UCP and NDP, with Smith’s party’s dominance over almost all of the rural and small city ridings giving them a numerical edge against Rachel Notley’s Edmonton-based NDP.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

William Aberhart baby found!

William Aberhart was Premier of Alberta from 1935 to 1943.
William Aberhart was Premier of Alberta from 1935 to 1943.
Social Credit supporters named election night baby, William Aberhart Holman, after radical Alberta premier

Amidst the celebratory headlines, a tiny box on the bottom right corner of the front page noted a milestone for another William Aberhart – William Aberhart Holman. It was a birth notice.

Titled ‘First Social Credit Baby,’ the one-paragraph notice announced that a Mr. and Mrs. A.B. Holman gave birth to a child at Griffiths Lake at 10:30 p.m. on the night of the senior Aberhart’s electoral win. The Social Credit-supporting couple decided to mark the moment by naming the baby after Alberta’s new premier.

“Hearty congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Holman from the Chronicle and all Social Credit Supporters” the short noticed concluded.

Read all about it on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

Kansas Governor John Leedy tried, tried and tried again to get elected in Alberta

John Leedy served as Governor of Kansas from 1896 to 1898.
John Leedy served as Governor of Kansas from 1896 to 1898.

Alberta’s history is filled with colourful characters and perhaps one of the most unlikely was John Whitnaw Leedy. But before Leedy even arrived in Alberta in 1910 and set his eyes on elected office in this province, he had already served as the Governor and a State Senator in Kansas and a mayor and city attorney in Alaska.

Born in Ohio in 1849, Leedy was elected to the Kansas State Senate in 1893 and served there until he was elected Governor of Kansas in 1896 by leading the Populist Party ticket to a sweep in that year’s election.

Asked what in his opinion caused the defeat of the Republicans in that year’s election, Leedy told the Kansas City Gazette in November 1896 that “I attribute the defeat of the Republican party in Kansas more to the fact that the state of Kansas is for free silver, than to any other cause.”

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email
Categories
Alberta Politics

Moral panic! UCP book ban explodes as government on brink of major labour dispute with Alberta’s teachers

Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides (foreground) and Minister of Finance Nate Horner (background) (source: Government of Alberta / Flickr)
Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides (foreground) and Minister of Finance Nate Horner (background) (source: Government of Alberta / Flickr)

Summer is coming to an end. Labour Day is just behind us and students are heading back to school. But it looks like Alberta teachers and the United Conservative Party government are on the brink of a major labour dispute.

It’s been 23 years since the last province-wide teachers strike in Alberta and the impasse at the bargaining table has increased the possibility of another major job action.

Read more on the Daveberta Substack

Email